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BRAZIL: Nature Paths
Instead of Wall for Rio Slum
By
Fabiana Frayssinet*
RIO DE JANEIRO (IPS/IFEJ) - Representatives of
the Rocinha slum and the Rio de Janeiro government
have agreed to replace a high wall, intended to
prevent this densely populated hillside
neighbourhood from spilling into the forest, with
ecological paths, parks and low walls.
This may also be an answer for other slums, known in
Brazil as "favelas", where high walls have been
planned. Many see such construction as an attempt to
create a sort of apartheid between the rich and poor
of this coastal city.
To reach the highest point in Rocinha, where a
government agency is beginning to build the
eco-boundary, you climb aboard a motorcycle-taxi,
the best way to get around the narrow, curving
streets of the shantytowns, which are mostly spread
across the sides of the "morros", the hills that
give Rio its signature look.
When the Portuguese conquistadors reached these
lands 500 years ago, they ran into the Atlantic
Forest (Mata Atlântica, in Portuguese), which
stretches across another 16 eastern Brazilian states
and is one of the planet's most biodiverse
ecosystems. But today just seven percent of the
original forest is still standing.
At Rocinha's summit, the shacks hanging precariously
over the ravine and the still-abundant vegetation
mark the limit of the slum. This is where the
cutting and burning of trees ended, at the edge of
this community of 200,000 people, one of Latin
America's largest shantytowns.
With the declared goal of halting deforestation and
preventing construction in areas at high risk of
landslides, the Rio government had proposed building
15 kilometres of three-metre-high walls around 14 of
the city's favelas.
But the project, which began to take shape with a
wall of steel and concrete in the southern favela of
Santa Marta, drew an outcry.
The wall is "an offensive metaphor that is a blow to
the people of the favelas," said Silvia Ramos,
coordinator of the Centre for Studies in Security
and Citizenship (CESC), in an interview for this
article.
It is a "kind of cage," in the opinion of Nadson
Ribeiro, a Santa Marta resident who works in
information technology. The "bars" of the cage are
the police, who "constantly keep watch over the
area" from below, and the wall above, he said.
That image is a reality in Rocinha.
While the large number of police officers deployed
to the shantytown as part of the initiative have
destroyed the street vendor stalls in the lower
areas of the favela, among the trees above, drug
traffickers have continued to ply their trade. The
dense vegetation provides an escape route, and many
believe that is the real reason behind the plan to
build walls: to fence in the drug trade.
Icaro Moreno, head of the state public works agency,
rejected the comparison with apartheid. "The border
used to be virtual, and now it is physical. What the
government did was to say, 'if you cross it or break
it, you will be violating public property'," he
said.
But some in Rocinha told him "no" to the
"eco-boundaries" as well. "Any wall is separatist,"
said Antonio Ferreira de Melo, president of the
Rocinha Neighbourhood Association, in an interview.
The mobilisation of this community, and of the
Favela Federation of Rio de Janeiro, has at least
led to a truce.
The government accepted the Rocinha proposal to
substitute the walls with a combination of stretches
of nature paths, including handrails for people with
mobility problems, bicycle and skating paths, and
playgrounds, alternating with stretches of walls -
which will stand no higher than 90 cm.
Three-metre high walls will be built only in areas
at risk of landslides.
The Association also proposed training forest
rangers from the community who would ensure respect
for the established boundaries.
Ocimar Santos, content editor for Rocinha's official
website, is satisfied with the solution. "It
wouldn't interrupt the right to movement and the
nature park will benefit the community," he said.
In his opinion, the community knows that its
disorderly expansion creates problems, such as in
sanitation and garbage collection. But a wall "is
not a positive symbol in any part of the world," he
noted.
In the view of Rio de Janeiro state Governor Sérgio
Cabral, the walls are intended to "protect" the
communities, who in exchange receive benefits from
the government, such as basic sanitation, education
and urban planning.
"It is a way to keep such spending from being lost
over time in the unregulated expansion of the
community," said Cabral, who belongs to the Party of
the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB), allied
with the left-wing administration of President Luiz
Inácio Lula da Silva.
The doubt now lies in whether the agreement reached
in Rocinha will be extended to other favelas in Rio.
Reactions had even come from beyond the national
borders. Jurist Álvaro Tirado Mejía, of the United
Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights, challenged the walls as "geographic
discrimination."
Luisa, a Rocinha resident, summed it up this way:
"The wall isn't for separating the trees, it's for
separating out the poor." She is not convinced
either that the nature paths are the best option.
"They say it's a park, but down there, in the middle
and upper class city, nature parks aren't cages,"
Luisa said.
The alarming loss of Atlantic Forest had contributed
to the idea of the wall, which had also been
proposed by previous governments.
The Atlas of Forest Remnants of the Mata Atlântica,
produced by the SOS Mata Atlântica Foundation and
the National Institute for Space Research, revealed
last month that the state of Rio de Janeiro alone
had lost 176,714 hectares of this ecosystem since
1985.
According to the study, the annual rate of
deforestation nearly doubled in the last three
years. Today, Rio has just 18 percent of the forests
that once stood in the state.
Fires, urban expansion and human occupation are the
main causes of deforestation in Rio, SOS Mata
Atlântica director Marcia Hirota said in an
interview for this article.
But the Foundation does not believe that the
"pressure on the native vegetation" comes only from
the favelas. There are also luxury condominiums,
homes and hotels, as well as "other types of
occupation that suppress the native plant cover,"
Hirota said.
A study by the municipal Pereira Passos Institute
indicates that half of the city's 750 favelas, which
are home to 1.5 million people, doubled in size
between 1994 and 2004.
Pressed between the hills and the ocean, the city
and its favelas, as well as its mansions and
middle-class neighbourhoods, keep expanding into the
surrounding forest.
Hirota believes in raising awareness among the
people "who live in urban areas... about the
importance of protecting the native flora."
Furthermore, she said it is essential to plan urban
expansion and establish "systematic controls by the
public authorities with society's participation,"
Hirota said.
The CESC's Ramos agrees that without establishing "a
culture of environmental awareness" among the local
population, the effort is worthless.
Many Rio governments have tried, unsuccessfully, to
reforest the hillsides in the favelas, attempting to
include local communities in the effort.
There are additional problems: Brazil has a deficit
of eight million housing units, especially in the
southeastern states of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and
Minas Gerais.
"When the government decides to build a wall, it's
because it doesn't want to invest in low-income
housing, for example," said Marcelo Freixo, a state
lawmaker of the opposition Party of Socialism and
Liberty.
Freixo believes the wall "is truly absurd," and that
"the government is once again saying that the
favelas are a problem."
The government's aim is "to control the poor
communities" and to try to prove to the southern
part of Rio de Janeiro, where the middle and upper
classes live, that the authorities do indeed
"govern."
*This story is part of a series of features on
sustainable development by IPS - Inter Press Service
and IFEJ - International Federation of Environmental
Journalists, for the Alliance of Communicators for
Sustainable Development (www.complusalliance.org).
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